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eSim

One of the big goals for 5G is to be able to use the technology to communicate with numerous devices other than cellphones and tablets. In order for that to happen the cellular industry is going to have to adopt eSim technology, which means creating virtual sim cards inside of devices rather than requiring the physical sim card that is used today in cellphones.

Traditional sim cards don’t play well in the IoT world. Many IoT devices will be tiny sensors that will be low power and that will be too small to hold a sim card. But probably more importantly, for IoT to grow as envisioned by the cellular carriers, customers are going to need an easy way to change wireless carrier without having to change a physical sim.

Picture the future smart home that has numerous smart devices that tie into a cellular network to get to the cloud. It’s likely that most devices you buy will come with a pre-paid subscription to some specific carrier, but that eventually that carrier will want homeowners to pay a monthly fee to continue the monitoring. I picture the nightmare where I might have devices that are monitored by each of the major cellular carriers, and each is going to want me to pay a monitoring fee to keep my devices connected to the cloud.

The only way most homes are going to agree to this vision of the world will be if they can migrate all of their devices to the same cellular network. And that means a homeowner (or farmer or factory owner) is going to want the option of homing all of their devices to the carrier of their choice. That’s where eSim comes in – it’s a virtual sim card that can be redirected at will by the customer without having to deal with physical sim cards. I envision sim manager software that will register and track all of my sim devices and that could move them en masse to a new carrier at my command.

Today’s sim card technology is a dinosaur and I liken it to the analog settop boxes that cable companies forced customers to rent from them. Cellular carriers have been extremely slow in accepting sim card technology because they know that having to physically change a sim card is a barrier that will stop some customers from changing service to another carrier. The big cellular companies say they have been working on eSim technology, but it’s been dragging slowly forward for years.

There are already products using eSim. For example, the Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch was the first commercial device to include eSim in 2016. Samsung used the eSim technology because there wasn’t room for a sim card. However, this is not an eSim card like I described above. A customer can’t change the carrier on smart watch that comes preset by Samsung. However, early eSim devices show that the technology works.

There are carriers in the country that are pushing for eSim. For example, smaller and regional cellular carriers like C-Spire and Ting are pushing for the technology. Some of the big cable companies are pushing for the technology.

What’s needed to make eSim work is a set of universal standards that would allow a customer to aim the eSim at the carrier of their choice. And that is going to take the cooperation of the big cellular companies. There is enough pressure on them that this change is likely to start happening over the next few years. Hopefully the eSim technology will just become part of the expected background technology that makes devices work on cellular networks, and that customers in the future will be able to easily decide their cellular carrier without the hassle of dealing with every cellular device in their home. My guess is that teenagers a decade from now will never have ever heard of a sim card and it will be just another obsolete technology.